In a semiconductor device manufacturing process, a wafer appearance inspection apparatus is used. A recipe needs to be prepared to automatically perform inspection using a wafer appearance inspection apparatus. However, a part of recipe preparation inevitably requires human assistance.
Operations requiring human assistance include an operation to change the detected sensitivity threshold setting depending on the location of a portion on a wafer or in an in-die inspection area. Since regions with a high contrast and regions with a low contrast are mixed, the inspection accuracy can be enhanced by setting a sensitivity threshold to each region.
To enhance the sensitivity of an inspection apparatus, needs are increasing for segmentizing an in-die inspection area and setting a different sensitivity threshold to each segmentized area. In a known technique (e.g., PLT 1), by displaying a panoramic die image (a displayed image produced by synthesizing a plurality of sections selected from an acquired image) on the background of an in-die inspection area setting screen, an in-die inspection area can be set based on the image.
Other known techniques include a method of dividing an area based on a SEM image for application in inspection and an inspection method by means of matching between an SEM or optical image and a template image.